Ahead of his scheduled November 15 book talk on “Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals,” our latest blog entry comes from Nathan Lents, Associate Professor in John Jay’s Department of Sciences. This entry was originally posted on his “The Human Evolution Blog.” 

By:  Nathan Lents, 10/19/16

Fear is a powerful motivator. It’s also a very interesting social behavior. Fear is a psychological tool that animal species use as a mechanism for avoidance.

Fear is one of our most basic emotions and is processed by a part of the brain called the amygdala. Animals, including humans, can have genetic predispositions toward fearing certain things. This has great adaptive value. For example, as I’ve written about previously, many prey animals are naturally fearful of their predators. Mice don’t have to learn to avoid snakes and cats; they are born fearing them. Many nocturnal animals have photophobia, which helps them stay out of moonlight and avoid being spotted. Inborn fears reveal past natural selection because animals that are naturally afraid of their main predators will be more likely to survive and pass on that genetically encoded fear.

Fear can also be learned. During times of danger, alarm, or even stress, our amygdala activates the fear response. This serves to train us to fear that danger when we see it again and thus avoid it. If you were mauled by a dog when you were young, you have a good chance of being fearful of dogs the rest of your life. Repeated exposure to dogs may not even help because, often, exposure simply boots up the fear program again, which could actually reinforce, rather than diminish, the fear.

One cool aspect of fear is that it can be learned vicariously by humans and other animals. That is to say, social animals can learn to fear some dangers simply by observing others experience the danger and without having to experience it first-hand. This is powerfully adaptive for the obvious reason that it reduces exposure to danger even without a priming event.

While vicarious learning of fear in nonhuman animals may have sounded far-fetched in previous decades, researchers on animal emotion and cognition have found that social mammals experience empathy and animal contagion. Animals are keenly aware of the emotional state of their fellow conspecifics, so it’s only natural that they would notice, and learn from, another animal in fear, pain, or danger.

The first rigorous scientific study of vicarious fear training in animals was published in 1984 by Susan Mineka and colleagues. In that groundbreaking study, Professor Mineka showed that juvenile rhesus monkeys learn to fear snakes not necessarily through their own dangerous exposure but by observing their parents behaving fearfully around them. In other words, the fear of snakes in monkeys can be a function of social learning. Since that now-classic study, vicarious fear training has been observed in a variety of social animals and has been used to probe genetic fear dispositions, empathy, neurodiversity, and many other social and evolutionary phenomena.

Researchers Carolyn Jones and Marie Monfils of the University of Texas recently discovered that vicarious fear learning in rats depends on dominance relationships.

To do this study, Jones employed a clever spin on a common experimental design. Before doing any fear training, she placed three rats in a cage and let them live and play together from the time of weaning until the experiment was done, 12-14 weeks later. This way, she could observe and document the social relationships that formed. As she told me, “Rats are very commonly used in behavioral studies, [but] usually we just order however many rats are necessary for the experiment, put them in a cage together, run the experiment after an allotted ‘acclimation’ period, and that’s it.” By letting the rats bond first, she could ask if dominance status mattered in the second-hand learning of fear.

Rats are very playful and social animals. They also exhibit dominance-based social ranking in their relationships. After watching each rat triad carefully for three weeks, Jones noted that one rat established himself as the dominant rat (D), another as submissive-1 (S1), and the third as the submissive-2 (S2). S1 is defined as the preferred target of the D rat, while S2 is the least involved in play behaviors, tending to avoid the D rat’s play invitations.

(All rats in this study were male to avoid the formation of reproduction-based relationships. Female rats were used in a different study on fear transmission by this group. The assignment of rats to these different social ranks was carried out according to established method involving video recordings of play behaviors and statistical analysis of dominant behaviors. For more detail, see the methods section of the paper.)

Once the social rankings were established, Jones selected one member of the triad to be the subject of fear conditioning involving the emission of a 20-second tone followed by a mild electric shock to the feet. This rat would quickly learn to fear the tone and so this rat is called the fear-conditioned (FC) rat.

The next day, Jones placed the FC rat together with one of the other rats, and then played the tone, this time without a shock. The FC rat became fearful upon hearing the tone and then second rat did (or did not) pick up this fear from the first one, without any shocks being delivered. This rat was then called fear-conditioned-by-proxy (FCbP).

On the third day, all three rats were put together again, the third rat not having been trained to fear the tone either with shocks or by-proxy, so was called “No FC.” Tones were played again and the fear responses were measured. In these experiments, fear was measured as “freezing behavior.” The experiments were run in all possible combinations of dominant and submissive rats playing the role of the FC, FCbP, and No FC. With six replicates for each type of triad and 96 rats in total, robust statistical analyses were possible.

The results were both surprising and clear. The S1 rats (the submissive rats that were the preferred target of the dominant rats) were able to become fear-conditioned by-proxy regardless of whether they took their training from the D rat or the S2 rat. The S2 rats, however, would only learn fear from the D rats, not the S1 rats. Further still, the D rats did not become fear-conditioned by-proxy from either the S1 or S2 rats. In other words, dominant rats would never learn fear from submissive rats; the play-avoidant submissive rats would only learn from the dominant rats; and the playful submissive rats would learn from both superiors and other submissives.

Jones then went on to study the vocalizations that took place during the fear-condition by-proxy attempts, as a means to possibly explain why fear-learning takes place in some combinations and not in others. She focused on low-frequency calls that rats sometimes make that correspond to negative emotions, including fear. Aside from big mouse-to-mouse differences with most mice not vocalizing at all, Jones found that the low-frequency vocalizations, when they did occur, correlated well with the learning of fear by-proxy. this is, some of the rats that learned to fear the warning tones may have done so because the FC rats were giving a warning to them.

The use of warning calls to signal the danger may provide the explanation for the fear-condition because it makes sense that rats would call out danger to warn those they have social alliances with while being less likely to warn animals they are indifferent to. As Jones told me, “the fear-conditioned demonstrators were more likely to emit alarm vocalizations if they had, for lack of a better word, a ‘friendly’ relationship with the observer rat.” Rats, it seems, look out for their friends.

The study goes on the explore serum corticosterone levels, expression of c-FOS in two different areas of the rats’ brains, and other mechanistic items of interest to those who specialize in the neuroscience of fear. The main take-away from this study is that rats, like humans, experience their world through the lens of social contact. Those of high social rank are more influential on others, while being less likely to be influenced by others. Those of lower social rank, on the other hand, have their own advantage: by paying attention to both superiors and other subordinates, they are able to learn from all of members of the group equally.

FDR famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But when it comes to learning from others, evolution has seen things differently.

Our latest blog entry comes from Dan Stageman, Director of Research Operations in the Office for the Advancement of Research at John Jay College. 

By: Dan Stageman, 8/22/16

Late last week the criminal justice blogosphere was abuzz with attempts to process the latest bit of good news dropped into the national conversation around mass incarceration. On August 18^th, the United States Department of Justice announced its intention to end the federal Bureau of Prison’s fourteen contracts with private/for-profit prison providers, citing as cause its own August 2016 investigation into the safety and security of these contract facilities. The report was, to put it mildly, damning:

We found that in a majority of the categories we examined, contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable BOP institutions. […] For example, the contract prisons confiscated eight times as many contraband cell phones […] had higher rates of assaults, both by inmates on other inmates and by inmates on staff […] serious or systemic deficiencies such as failure to initiate discipline in over 50 percent of incidents […] were improperly housing new inmates in Special Housing Units [i.e. solitary confinement][etc.] (p. ii)

While I of course ‘cherry-picked’ this litany of deficiencies from the DOJ report’s executive summary, they represent a fairly neutered echo of the similar findings that advocacy organizations – from the ACLU, to Human Rights Watch,Detention Watch Network to The Sentencing Project – have presented to the public and the federal government for ten-plus years to little effect.

It is a meaningful victory, for these organizations and the very real people whose interests they represent, that someone in the federal government finally decided to listen to their recommendations – and more importantly, to act on them decisively. It is a victory that will result in a measurable improvement in quality of life for thousands of prisoners and their families. It should not, however, be mistaken for a solution to the problem of for-profit/private prisons. To be fair, most of the media coverage of the DOJ announcement that I have reviewed has been appropriately circumspect. The Guardian’s Jon Swaine and his co-authors, for example, note that the BOP’s for-profit contract facilities “almost exclusively incarcerate low-risk inmates convicted of immigration offenses […] around 22,000 people at an annual cost of $600m.” This is about ten percent of the BOP’s total inmate population.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics report linked above, it is also about 17% of the total population of US prisoners held in private/for-profit facilities – a proportion that might help to explain the precipitous drops in stock value experienced by the two largest publicly traded US private prison operators on the day of the DOJ’s announcement. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) lost 52% of its share value; GEO Group lost 45%. The third largest operator, Management and Training Corporation (MTC), is privately held, so we can only speculate that it lost a similar proportion of its market value. All three companies are unsurprisingly putting on a brave public face in the wake of the announcement: CCA touts its “keen observ[ation] of the BOP’s declining inmate population over the last three years”, implying the decision is less important than the market has made it out to be; GEO Group focuses its terse statement on its “efforts to provide industry-leading offender rehabilitation programs and reentry services”; MTC takes direct issue with the findings of the DOJ report, trumpeting in the title of its response that “Contract Prisons Provide Great Value to Corrections.”

Do these for-profit prison corporations indeed have reason to remain optimistic about an apparently shrinking market? Both CCA’s and GEO Group’s stock prices rebounded significantly on Friday from their precipitous Thursday lows, while remaining well below their previous averages. The answer, however, may lie less in watching the reactions of the market than in the clues we can glean from two less widely-reported recent news stories. The first is a two-week old investigation from the Guardian’s Renee Feltz on (and watch out here for flying acronyms) the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) successor program to Secure Communities (SComm), the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP). The second is from the Guardian’s chief reporter Ed Pilkington: an exposé of detention conditions in border facilities operated by ICE’s sister-agency, Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

A lot of folks have a working knowledge – accompanied by an appropriate degree of moral outrage – of what private/for-profit prisons are, what mass incarceration is, what is generally wrong with the criminal justice system. A lot fewer folks, in my experience, have a parallel knowledge of the immigrant detention system: the shortlist of people who I can talk to about Secure Communities without supplying a detailed explanation seems to be limited primarily to other academic researchers and advocates in the field. Most people register surprise when I tell them that a quarter of CCA’s 2015 revenue in 2015 came from immigrant detention – specifically, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement – or that GEO Group’s revenue breakdowns are similar. Immigrant detention remains, for a variety of reasons, a uniquely profitable segment of the private corrections industry. The DOJ’s recent announcement will do nothing to reduce that.

What should have reduced the profitability of immigrant detention was the transition from the SComm to PEP. SComm has been described by Stanford researcher Juan M. Pedroza as a “water mill that collects removable aliens in successive buckets […] without pause across levels of priority” (Pedroza 2013, p.62) – an apt description of how the program operated for the most part indiscriminately. Secure Communities, in place from 2008 through its discontinuation in 2014, used the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) system to allow ICE to surveil (at its peak) every arrest by a local law enforcement agency nationwide to determine whether the arrestee had any known immigration violations on her record. Any such violation, whether criminal or not – i.e. visa overstays, prior unauthorized entry, exclusions, etc. – would result in ICE issuing a ‘detainer’ to the arresting agency. A detainer is a request that the arresting agency hold the arrestee until ICE can take her into custody – whether the arrest results in criminal charges or not.

SComm came under criticism because of the frequency with which it led to the eventual deportation of individuals with no criminal records or very minor ones (such as status offenses like loitering, or traffic offenses like broken taillights) – some 178 thousand, or nearly half, of the 375 thousand deportations attributed to the program throughout seven years of its existence. PEP was intended to solve this very problem, ostensibly restricting detainer requests to arrestees who had been “convicted of an offense listed under the DHS civil immigration priorities, […] intentionally participated in an organized criminal gang to further the illegal activity of the gang, or poses a danger to national security”.

Except, according to Feltz’s review of data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse(TRAC), it hasn’t turned out that way. Instead, “half of the so-called ‘holds’ were placed on people who had been arrested but actually had no criminal conviction.” In fact, the TRAC report indicates that some two-thirds of the detainer requests issued by ICE under the Priority Enforcement Program were for individuals with no criminal conviction or the lowest level of offense – a proportion exceeding the approximately 50% with similar offenses (or lack thereof) detained under Secure Communities. TRAC goes on to break down the detainers by crime type; after ‘No Criminal Conviction’, offenses like ‘Traffic Offense’ (5,310 detainers in 2014), ‘Public Order Crimes’ (1,425), ‘Disorderly Conduct’ (1,223) and ‘Drug Possession’ (2,004) feature prominently. Major crimes like ‘Homicide’ (603) and ‘Sex Assault’ (1,272) together represent about 1% of the total.

Numbers like these, in the context of an ostensibly reformed immigration enforcement program, illustrate the tenacity of ICE’s institutional orientation towards maximizing deportation – as well as the difficulty of calling the deportation regime to heel, after ten-plus years of increasing local control. It is the problem that John Jay political scientist and geographer Monica Varsanyi and her co-authors address in their recent book, Policing Immigrants: Local Law Enforcement on the Front Lines (U. Chicago Press, 2016):

Being found in the country without authorization is not currently a crime, but it is increasingly regarded as such because of the merging of law-enforcement responsibilities with immigration enforcement. […] The federal government has avoided critically examining how local law-enforcement agencies identify and process the suspected unauthorized immigrants they turn over to federal immigration authorities. (p.5-6)

The thousands of unauthorized immigrants detained under PEP are, like those detained under its predecessor SComm, originally arrested by local law enforcement agencies, under local policy and for local reasons. ICE, along with its sister agency Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), have in effect become bureaucratic middle-men between local law enforcement and private/for-profit prison corporations: facilitating apprehension over which they have minimal influence, and funding detention over which they exercise minimal oversight.

It is the latter issue that Ed Pilkington’s exposé of the CBP’s Tucson holding facility brings into sharp focus.

The several deeply disturbing image show immigrant detainees packed “like sardines in a tin” under emergency blankets in a filthy holding cell. Another shows another changing a baby’s diaper amid a pile of trash on a concrete floor.

It isn’t clear whether these facilities are privately owned or operated; CBP is more opaque than ICE in this regard, and in any case, detainees are unlikely to spend more than a few days in CBP holding facilities before being deported – in contrast to ICE facilities, where immigrants can spend years before their eventual deportation. What is clear, however, is that these immigrants have been snared by an institutional culture that regards them as less than human – treating them (if the above photos are any indication) as commodities to be processed. It may be that there is no profit to be made via CBP’s short-term detention of immigrants in holding cells, but there is certainly profit to be made in returning them to the southern side of the border: Security Firm G4S contracts with CBP to remove the immigrants on what it dubs (in its promotional literature) “The Bus No One Wants to Catch”. The Marshall Project’s recent exposé (by Eli Hager and Alysia Santo) on the private prisoner transport industry demonstrates pretty decisively how this moniker is earned.

Unauthorized immigrants, regardless of the symbolic importance of the DOJ’s decision on private prisons, will remain at the center of this deadly triangle: at one end an anti-immigrant local politics of enforcement; at another the dehumanizing institutional culture of two massive federal bureaucracies; and at the third, a constantly adapting market, twisting the human bodies of detainees into corporate profit. Well-meaning federal decrees cannot substitute for deep and abiding organizational reform, or binding legislative policy; indeed, it is entirely possible they could be reversed at the stroke of a pen, depending on the results November 8^th. Advocates and researchers cannot afford to take a victory lap while for-profit prison corporations adapt, and immigrant detainees suffer.

Our latest blog entry comes from Peggilee Wupperman, Associate Professor of Psychology at John Jay College. This entry was originally posted on 7/30/2016 on her “Beyond Self-Destructive Behavior” Blog at Psychology Today.

You have promised yourself that you are not going to engage in any dysregulated behavior this evening.

You’ve told yourself that you absolutely, positively will NOT (pick one or more: have that drink, binge on that food, take those pills, engage in self-harm, place that bet, etcetera). And you are determined to keep that promise.

Then you get home.

You have not had a particularly bad day. You cannot pinpoint any specific reason why you are experiencing cravings and/or urges that feel intolerable. And yet, suddenly all you can think about is that drink/food/pills/harm/bet/etc.

Your situation is not uncommon.

It can be easy to judge yourself in such circumstances. It can also be easy for other people to judge someone who says she/he is going to stop a dysregulated behavior – but then does not do so.

The following is a paraphrased analogy told by a woman who was working to stop drinking; however, it is also relevant to the cravings and urges often experienced when stopping any dysregulated behavior.

People who have never felt controlled by a dysregulated behavior often don’t understand why the behavior can feel so impossible to stop. So let me tell you what the cravings and urges feel like:

Imagine that you have not had any food or beverage except water for more than two days, and you feel famished. At some point, imagine that a person sets up a large buffet in the living room of your home. (This is an analogy; it does not have to make sense.) The buffet contains all of your favorite foods, and the scent of the food is overwhelming.

The person tells you that guests will be arriving to eat the food in a few hours, and you are not supposed to eat or even touch the food – since it is not yours. You agree that you will not eat any of the food.

Then the person leaves. You will be alone with the food for several hours. And you have not had anything to eat for more than two days.

At first, you might try to focus on other things – perhaps watch TV, surf the web, catch up on paperwork from the office, or talk to friends/family. However, you will likely have difficulty focusing on anything other than your intense hunger and the smell of the food.

Eventually, your cravings and urges will likely become so strong that you find it impossible to think about anything else. The urge to eat the food will seem like a powerful force that is almost controlling you. Over time, resisting your cravings/urges for even a few more minutes may feel utterly intolerable.   

That is what cravings and urges feel like when I try to stop my dsyregulated behavior.

Of course, the above story does not fit exactly with all behaviors. However, the intensity and intolerability of the cravings and/or urges do fit what many people feel when working to stop dysregulated behaviors.

Why is the intensity so strong? Earlier posts have discussed why some people find dysregulated behaviors almost impossible to resist. (For the basics, click here. For more details, click here, here, here, and here.) However, the purpose of this post is not to talk about cause. Instead, the purpose is to:

• decrease judgement, and
• increase understanding of what cravings and urges can feel like to someone who is in the midst of them.

The above analogy explains why distraction and good ol’ fashioned willpower will often only work for a short time. Methods do exist to help cravings and urges become more tolerable – and eventually help you feel that you are no longer controlled by cravings and urges. Most of those methods often require some form of empirically supported therapy. More details on finding such therapy will be provided in future posts.

Until then, please remember:

• Before you judge someone who struggles with dysregulated behavior, take a moment to consider that the person’s cravings and urges may feel more intolerable than you can even imagine.

• Before judging yourself for struggling with cravings and urges, take a moment to remind yourself that your experiences are more common than you may realize.

Our latest blog entry comes from Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Management at John Jay College. This entry was originally posted on 7/17/2016 at The New West (the official blog of the Western Political Science Association).

Blog entry by: Heath Brown, 7/18/2016

It is Veepstakes time again and all eyes are on the choices Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are making. Much media attention has been drawn to the possibility that the vice presidential picks will help win a key swing state in November, serve as an “attack dog” on the campaign trail, or sparkle in a future debate. While this is all possible, and negative media coverage may deter some candidates, especially women, from seeking the post, there seems to be little evidence that it ultimately matters that much for the election. (See Kyle Kopko and Christopher Devine’s Politico piece from April on this, and also Boris Heersink and Brenton Peterson’s Monkey Cage blog piece that suggests small VP effects).

Probably of more importance, Dave Hopkins argues convincingly on his blog, is that VP choices matter because of “the window that they provide into the presidential candidates who select them.” Donald Trump’s much anticipated, but ultimately delayed VP announcement, probably says something about his style of deliberation over difficult decisions.

Another reason to pay attention to the vice presidential choices are the role the person plays in presidential transition planning and early governance of the administration. Gone are the days when the vice president was referred to as “his superfluous Excellency” as one snarky Senator referred to Vice President John Adams.

In his new book, The White House Vice President: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden (University Press of Kansas), Joel K. Goldstein shows how since 1976 the vice presidency has been on the rise. No longer are the responsibilities of the office what Woodrow Wilson’s Vice President surmised: “to ring the White House bell every morning and ask what is the state of the health of the president.”

Instead, vice presidents have taken on major responsibilities for assuring the success of the president, and that has commenced during the transition period. Carter announced immediately after the election that Mondale would work closely with him on selecting high-ranking administration officials and that he would consult with Mondale on program initiatives. Mondale is given particular credit for persuading Carter to choose Joseph Califano to head Housing, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and Robert Bergland as Secretary of Agriculture. Vice presidents-elect had never before held such sway during the transition period.

Mondale’s legacy has not been forgotten. Twenty-five years later, Dick Cheney, who was famously involved in his own selection, went on to direct the Bush presidential transition team. Goldstein suggests that some of Cheney’s eventual power in the White House, especially in the first-term, derived from his opportunity to “place allies in important positions” during the transition period.

Much remains the same today, and it seems likely that the eventual winner of this fall’s election will have relied on their running mate, as much for helping to secure votes, as for their work planning for the transition to power. Presidential transitions may officially begin after Election Day, but (as I wrote about on this blog in June), in reality they begin long before. Already, Trump has named Governor Chris Christie to begin his transition planning, and Clinton likely has a large transition team at work as well. I suspect their choice of running mate will join in that pre-election transition planning, helping to vet potential cabinet nominees, develop policy proposals, and figure out what the organization of new White House will look like.

While much of this planning will occur in private, out of the eye of the voting public and under-reported by the media, it lays the ground-work for governance. For this reason, while we may not be able to observe it now, the soundness of the vice presidential picks will be later judged in the effectiveness of our next president and the sound functioning of the future White House.

Our latest blog entry comes from Adam Berlin, Professor of English at John Jay College. This entry was originally posted on 5/6/2016 at newsmax.com.

Blog entry by: Adam Berlin, 5/16/2016

I watch my news on MSNBC.

In the mornings I like “Morning Joe” because conservative Joe Scarborough and liberal Mika Brzezinski speak their biased hearts, yet are willing to call out inconsistencies and stupidities in their own parties.

In the evenings, I tolerate the caricatures that Rachel Madow and Chris Hayes (sometimes interchangeable from their glasses on down) have become, because they’re liberals who sometimes dig deeper into headline news and because, well, they’re smart. (Catch Rachel Madow on any show but her own and she’s a star, so much more powerful and impassioned than her I’m-so-cute-and-interesting-[and falsely humble] TV persona.)

I put up with Chris Mathews who delivers monologues instead of interviews during his interviews, and shills his books during his monologues.

I try to stay patient as Lawrence O’Donnel enunciates every single word, turning twenty minutes of material into an hour.

I’m a liberal and prefer my TV media liberal. And I certainly prefer MSNBC’s hosts to CNN’s more-conservative takes on the news. Perhaps what I like best about MSNBC is that each host has a sense of humor, can laugh openly, can take a breath and crack a joke. That’s not the case with CNN’s dour Wolf Blitzer or buttoned-up John King. I’ll give Anderson Cooper a bye for two reasons: People stop me on the street thinking I’m him, and, far more important, he can laugh at himself and others.

A sense of humor — I’m starting to think that’s the real litmus test when separating liberals from conservatives. Have you ever seen Mitch McConnell’s pursed lips smile? Have you ever heard Rush Limbaugh laugh a genuine, non-sneering laugh? Have you ever noticed what really makes that famous politically-split couple, James Carville and Mary Matalin, so different? Answer — one laughs a lot, the other perpetually scowls.

But when Cruz and Kasich got KO’d by Donald Trump, well inside the distance, MSNBC lost its sense of humor. Sure, there were lecherously-playful comments about Melania’s runway walk toward the podium where Trump would declare victory in Indiana. There were comments about the spokesmodels behind him.

Still, the predominant emotion at MSNBC wasn’t humor, wasn’t an absurdist’s delight in this new reality, a blustering reality star with the ego the size of Manhattan had become the Republican nominee. Instead, there was outrage. Instead there was incredulity and even shock. Instead, there was a reiterative listing of all the things Trump has supposedly done so wrong, so stupidly, so irresponsibly. He was labelled a hater and a racist. He was labelled a man who knows nothing about politics. He was labelled, even as he won, a loser and liability. And, by insinuation, all the people who voted for him were fools.

Here’s the rub: MSNBC is as responsible as anyone for Donald Trump’s victory. The coverage of The Don was non-stop. The discussion about The Don was non-stop. When The Don held a rally, MSNBC was there more than any other network. The reason is crass-clear — MSNBC wanted the ratings. And it’s a hell of a lot easier to criticize and make fun of than to compliment and analyze. (I’m guilty as charged in my first paragraphs here.)

Had MSNBC been principled, had they truly wanted to make a unified effort to stop Trump (which would have reflected their political views, which I’m sure, each MSNBC host would tell you, are based on principle) then they would have put their coverage where their collective mouth was. They would have limited Trump coverage. They would have given their air time to Hillary and Bernie and to some of the larger political issues that this country faces.

Several news stories that highlighted the dangers of free trade might have cut into Trump’s appeal. In-depth reporting on bankruptcies might have helped the cause. A more timely look at the history of Trump’s recently-anointed campaign manager Paul Manafort and Manafort’s relationship to Vladimir Putin might have highlighted the hypocrisy of Trump’s isolationist rants.

Instead, it was Trump-time all the time on MSNBC.

They made a choice: they covered Trump for ratings; they traded integrity for a bigger piece of the viewing pie. There’s a political word for this, a word we hear very often these days — it’s called pandering. MSNBC revealed itself as the Hillary Clinton of news stations.

I’ll keep watching MSNBC. Just like too many democrats will vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election. There’s no better alternative.

But MSNBC should come clean. MSNBC’s talking heads should remove their false masks of outrage and incredulity. They know the truth. They helped make Donald Trump possible. And, for them, that should be no laughing matter.

Why the Trump presidential transition has just begun

Our latest blog entry comes from Heath Brown, assistant professor of public policy at John Jay College. This entry was originally posted on TheHill.com.

Blog entry by: Heath Brown, 4/14/2016 (original: 4/13/16)

For much of this presidential campaign, Donald Trump (R) has been dismissed as an nonserious performer, capable of drawing large crowds and attention, but not much more. Seemingly unaware of many policy details and unwilling to name who has shaped his view on key issues, what a Trump administration would actually look like has remained a mystery.

That mystery may have just been solved. After a stinging defeat in the Wisconsin primary, Trump elevated Paul Manafort’s role on his campaign to oversee the GOP convention delegate process. The choice of Manafort signals not just a change in direction for the campaign, but also gives a strong indication of what a Trump White House might look like.

Manafort is a seasoned Washington insider, operating at the intersection of money, politics and influence for the last four decades. How Manafort rose to prominence suggests several important, yet largely underappreciated, aspects of electing a new president.

After Ronald Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in 1980, Manafort was named coordinator of personnel during Reagan’s transition to power. The presidential transition period — often eclipsed by the attention paid to the campaign — occurs over 77 days between Election Day and the inauguration in January. It is during this period that hundreds of critical decisions are made about public policy and who will be appointed to join the new president in the White House and in the Cabinet.

For Reagan, personnel decisions were no trivial matter. Reagan’s team adhered to the mantra that “personnel is policy” to emphasize how important it was to have a team of ideological loyalists to implement his agenda. Manafort helped Reagan appoint an array of conservative stalwarts across government, hundreds drawn from the new brain centers of the conservative movement: the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution. Many were brand new to Washington, arriving in Washington, D.C. from California after decades of loyalty to Reagan.

Yet when the transition period ended, Manafort didn’t follow others in the conservative movement into the Reagan administration. Instead, Manafort and his partners on the transition team, Roger Stone and Charlie Black, opted to start their own lobbying firm. Manafort traded on his service to a newly elected president not with a job in the White House, but by peddling influence in the then-burgeoning field of high-priced lobbying.

To be sure, Manfort was not the first to lay the foundation of a lucrative future on K Street during a presidential transition. Twenty years earlier, Clark Clifford helped John Kennedy transition from candidate to president, but did not later join the Kennedy administration. Instead, Kennedy joked that “all he asked in return was that we advertise his law firm on the backs of one-dollar bills.”

Fifty years later, Trump’s choice of Manafort suggests several things. First, if Trump hadn’t yet started planning for his transition, he is now. Manafort knows exactly how much work must be completed immediately after the election and that planning must begin long before November.

Second, in choosing Manafort, Trump’s history of vague answers about whom he would appoint will soon change — if not publicly, then at least privately. While he courts delegates for the GOP convention, Manafort will also begin assembling the names of supporters who will be considered for key posts in a possible Trump administration. Given the aversion of many establishment Republican insiders to Trump, these names may come from as far away as they did during Reagan’s transition, likely holding few allegiances to the Republican Party, but a deep commitment to Trumpism.

Finally, during Trump’s pre-election transition, it seems likely that he will not be averse to a prominent role for lobbyists and influence-peddling. President Obama famously imposed strict restrictions on what lobbyists could and could not do during his transition, and every indication suggests that 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney would have upheld this precedent if he had been elected. However, the choice of Manafort indicates that Trump may not be as concerned about the conflicts-of-interest inherent to having lobbyists plan for his administration while at the same time representing clients who have ongoing business with government.

For months, experts have worried about the lack of clarity on policy and personnel issues from Trump. We may now be entering a phase where those worries will shift to the increasingly clear picture of what a Trump administration will look like. As many focus on Manafort’s effectiveness as presidential campaign adviser, all should keep an eye on Manafort as presidential transition planner, too.

On 40th anniversary of Buckey v. Valeo, political consulting booms

Our latest blog entry comes from Heath Brown, assistant professor of public policy at John Jay College. This entry was originally posted on TheHill.com. Be on the look out for Professor Brown’s forthcoming book, “Pay-to-Play Politics: How Money Defines the American Democracy,” available this April!

Blog entry by: Heath Brown, 2/17/2016 (original: 1/27/16)

Saturday is the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s momentous campaign finance decision, Buckley v. Valeo. A lot has been pinned on that decision, including the establishment of a link between money and free speech, the skyrocketing cost of campaigns, and the recent birth of super-PACs and numerous dark-money groups. We may be looking at a $10 billion election this year, and the Buckley decision should receive some of the credit for that.

A new book adds another legacy: the ascent of political consultants. According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, during the last election cycle (2012), the top firm, GMMB, billed for over $400 million in political media services — nearly $100 million more than they had four years earlier.

Business is good, but how did we get to this point?

In Adam Sheingate’s just-published book, “Building a Business of Politics: The Rise of Political Consulting and the Transformation of American Democracy” he argues that in failing to throw out the campaign finance reporting requirements at the center of the 1971 Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), the Supreme Court blessed a system of nearly unlimited campaign expenditures that simply had to be tracked and disclosed. That tracking of how campaigns funds were spent opened the door for consultants — like those at GMMB, Mentzer Media Services and American Rambler Productions, to name just a few — to amass ever-larger portions of the political pie.

Prior to FECA and the Buckley decision, political campaigns were much freer to spend money to win elections. Without the requirement to report detailed expenditure data to the federal government, campaigns could be cavalier with their funds and freely distribute “walk around” money to local party operatives to turn out voters. During this period, political consultants had been growing in prominence, especially in California, but were still secondary players to the two parties in most campaigns.

After the 1976 ruling, each campaign dollar had to be reported to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in increasingly specific ways, or campaigns risked a federal audit. Political consultants, all too eager to provide such accounting, could document exactly how and where the money would be spent. Vendors could estimate precisely how much would be spent to shoot and edit an ad and how much it would cost to buy airtime to broadcast that ad on television. As we moved forward from the 1970s to the 1980s, public opinion polls, direct mail fundraising solicitations and multimedia advertising, as well as a variety of other new campaign techniques, could all be contracted for by candidates, and easily accounted to the FEC. Today, the legitimacy of a candidate is often judged by which consultant has been hired.

Sheingate’s claim is not that political consulting started in 1976; in fact, he tells a fascinating 100-year history of the long development of the field. Rather, he argues convincingly that the business of politics was inadvertently transformed and turbocharged by the Buckley decision. As the court eliminated the expenditure limits of FECA, it created an open environment for the escalation of political spending and a perfect regulatory environment for businesses to boom.

Two…Three…Many Flints: America’s Coast-to-Coast Toxic Crisis

Our latest blog entry comes from David Rosner, Columbia University, and Gerald Markowtiz, John Jay College. This entry was originally posted on TomDispatch.com.  

Blog entry by: David Rosner & Gerald Markowitz, 2/9/2016

“I know if I was a parent up there, I would be beside myself if my kids’ health could be at risk,” said President Obama on a recent trip to Michigan.  “Up there” was Flint, a rusting industrial city in the grip of a “water crisis” brought on by a government austerity scheme.  To save a couple of million dollars, that city switched its source of water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, a long-time industrial dumping ground for the toxic industries that had once made their home along its banks.  Now, the city is enveloped in a public health emergency, with elevated levels of lead in its water supply and in the blood of its children.

The price tag for replacing the lead pipes that contaminated its drinking water, thanks to the corrosive toxins found in the Flint River, is now estimated at up to $1.5 billion. No one knows where that money will come from or when it will arrive.  In the meantime, the cost to the children of Flint has been and will be incalculable.   As little as a few specks of lead in the water children drink or in flakes of paint that come off the walls of old houses and are ingested can change the course of a life. The amount of lead dust that covers a thumbnail is enough to send a child into a coma or into convulsions leading to death. It takes less than a tenth of that amount to cause IQ loss, hearing loss, or behavioral problems like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia. The Centers for Disease Control(CDC), the government agency responsible for tracking and protecting the nation’s health, says simply, “No safe blood lead level in children has been identified.”

President Obama would have good reason to worry if his kids lived in Flint.  But the city’s children are hardly the only ones threatened by this public health crisis.  There’s a lead crisis for children in Baltimore, Maryland, Herculaneum,Missouri, Sebring, Ohio, and even the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., and that’s just to begin a list.  State reportssuggest, for instance, that “18 cities in Pennsylvania and 11 in New Jersey may have an even higher share of children with dangerously elevated levels of lead than does Flint.” Today, scientists agree that there is no safe level of lead for children and at least half of American children have some of this neurotoxin in their blood.  The CDC is especially concerned about the more than 500,000 American children who have substantial amounts of lead in their bodies. Over the past century, an untold number have had their IQs reduced, their school performances limited, their behaviors altered, and their neurological development undermined.  From coast to coast, from the Sun Belt to the Rust Belt, children have been and continue to be imperiled by a century of industrial production, commercial gluttony, and abandonment by the local, state, and federal governments that should have protected them.  Unlike in Flint, the “crisis” seldom comes to public attention.

Two, Three… Many Flints

In Flint, the origins of the current crisis lay in the history of auto giant General Motors (GM) and its rise in the middle decades of the twentieth century to the status of the world’s largest corporation. GM’s Buick plant alone once occupied “an area almost a mile and a half long and half a mile wide,” according to the Chicago Tribune, and several Chevrolet and other GM plants literally covered the waterfront of “this automotive city.” Into the Flint River went the toxic wastes of factories large and small, which once supplied batteries, paints, solders, glass, fabrics, oils, lubricating fluids, and a multitude of other materials that made up the modern car. In these plants strung out along the banks of the Flint and Saginaw rivers and their detritus lay the origins of the present public health emergency.

The crisis that attracted President Obama’s attention is certainly horrifying, but the children of Flint have been poisoned in one way or another for at least 80 years. Three generations of those children living around Chevrolet Avenue in the old industrial heart of the city experienced an environment filled with heavy metal toxins that cause neurological conditions in them and cardiovascular problems in adults.

As Michael Moore documented in his film Roger and Me, GM abandoned Flint in a vain attempt to stave off financial disaster.  Having sucked its people dry, the company ditched the city, leaving it to deal with a polluted hell without the means to do so.  Like other industrial cities that have suffered this kind of abandonment, Flint’s population is majority African American and Latino, and has a disproportionate number of families living below the poverty line.  Of its 100,000 residents, 65% are African American and Latino and 42%  are mired in poverty.

The president should be worried about Flint’s children and local, state, and federal authorities need to fix the pipes, sewers, and water supply of the city. Technically, this is a feasible, if expensive, proposition. It’s already clear, however, that the political will is just not there even for this one community. Gina McCarthy, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, has refused to provide Flint’s residents with even a prospective timetable for replacing their pipes and making their water safe. There is, however, a far graver problem that is even less easy to fix: the mix of racism and corporate greed that have put lead and other pollutants into millions of homes in the United States. The scores of endangered kids in Flint are just the tip of a vast, toxic iceberg.  Even Baltimore, which first identified its lead poisoning epidemic in the 1930s, still faces a crisis, especially in largely African American communities, when it comes to the lead paint in its older housing stock.

Just this month, Maryland’s secretary of housing, community, and development, Kenneth C. Holt, dismissed the never-ending lead crisis in Baltimore by callously suggesting that it might all be a shuck.  A mother, he said, might fake such poisoning by putting “a lead fishing weight in her child’s mouth [and] then take the child in for testing.” Such a tactic, he indicated, without any kind of proof, was aimed at making landlords “liable for providing the child with [better] housing.” Unfortunately, the attitudes of Holt and Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan have proven all too typical of the ways in which America’s civic and state leaders have tended to ignore, dismiss, or simply deny the real suffering of children, especially those who are black and Latino, when it comes to lead and other toxic chemicals.

There is, in fact, a grim broader history of lead poisoning in America.  It was probably the most widely dispersed environmental toxin that affected children in this country.  In part, this was because, for decades during the middle of the twentieth century, it was marketed as an essential ingredient in industrial society, something without which none of us could get along comfortably.  Those toxic pipes in Flint are hardly the only, or even the primary, source of danger to children left over from that era.

In the 1920s, tetraethyl lead was introduced as an additive for gasoline.  It was lauded at the time as a “gift of God” by a representative of the Ethyl Corporation, a creation of GM, Standard Oil, and Dupont, the companies that invented, produced, and marketed the stuff. Despite warnings that this industrial toxin might pollute the planet, which it did, almost three-quarters of a century would pass before it was removed from gasoline in the United States.  During that time, spewed out of the tailpipes of hundreds of millions of cars and trucks, it tainted the soil that children played in and was tracked onto floors that toddlers touched.  Banned from use in the 1980s, it still lurks in the environment today.

Meanwhile, homes across the country were tainted by lead in quite a different way. Lead carbonate, a white powder, was mixed with linseed oil to create the paint that was used in the nation’s homes, hospitals, schools, and other buildings until 1978.  Though its power to harm and even kill children who sucked on lead-painted windowsills, toys, cribs, and woodwork had long been known, it was only in that year that the federal government banned its use in household paints.

Hundreds of tons of the lead in paint that covered the walls of houses, apartment buildings, and workplaces across the United States remains in place almost four decades later, especially in poorer neighborhoods where millions of African American and Latino children currently live.  Right now, most middle class white families feel relatively immune from the dangers of lead, although the gentrification of old neighborhoods and the renovation of old homes can still expose their children to dangerous levels of lead dust from the old paint on those walls. However, economically and politically vulnerable black and Hispanic children, many of whom inhabit dilapidated older housing, still suffer disproportionately from the devastating effects of the toxin. This is the meaning of institutional racism in action today.  As with the water flowing into homes from the pipes of Flint’s water system, so the walls of its apartment complexes, not to mention those in poor neighborhoods of Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, and virtually every other older urban center in the country, continue to poison children exposed to lead-polluted dust, chips, soil, and air.

Over the course of the past century, tens of millions of children have been poisoned by lead and millions more remain in danger of it today. Add to this the risks these same children face from industrial toxins like mercury, asbestos, and polychlorinated biphenyls (better known as PCBs) and you have an ongoing recipe for a Flint-like disaster but on a national scale.

In truth, the United States has scores of “Flints” awaiting their moments.  Think of them as ticking toxic time bombs — just an austerity scheme or some official’s poor decision away from a public health disaster.  Given this, it’s remarkable, even in the wake of Flint, how little attention or publicity such threats receive.  Not surprisingly, then, there seems to be virtually no political will to ensure that future generations of children will not suffer the same fate as those in Flint.

The Future of America’s Toxic Past

A series of decisions by state and local officials turned Flint’s chronic post-industrial crisis into a total public health disaster.  If clueless, corrupt, or heartless government officials get all the blame for this (and blame they do deserve), the larger point will unfortunately be missed — that there are many post-industrial Flints, many other hidden tragedies affecting America’s children that await their moments in the news. Treat Flint as an anomaly and you condemn families nationwide to bear the damage to their children alone, abandoned by a society unwilling to invest in cleaning up a century of industrial pollution, or even to acknowledge the injustice involved.

Flint may be years away from a solution to its current crisis, but in a few cities elsewhere in the country there is at least a modicum of hope when it comes to developing ways to begin to address this country’s poisonous past. In California, for example, 10 cities and counties, including San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Oakland, have successfully sued and won an initial judgment against three lead pigment manufacturers for $1.15 billion. That money will be invested in removing lead paint from the walls of homes in these cities. If this judgment is upheld on appeal, it would be an unprecedented and pathbreaking victory, since it would force a polluting industry to clean up the mess it created and from which it profited.

There have been other partial victories, too. In Herculaneum, Missouri, for instance, where half the children within a mile of the nation’s largest lead smelter suffered lead poisoning, jurors returned a $320 million verdict against Fluor Corporation, one of the world’s largest construction and engineering firms. That verdict is also on appeal, while the company has moved its smelter to Peru where whole new populations are undoubtedly being poisoned.

President Obama hit the nail on the head with his recent comments on Flint, but he also missed the larger point. There he was just a few dozen miles from that city’s damaged water system when he spoke in Detroit, another symbol of corporate abandonment with its own grim toxic legacy. Thousands of homes in the Motor City, the former capital of the auto industry, are still lead paint disaster areas. Perhaps it’s time to widen the canvas when it comes to the poisoning of America’s children and face the terrible human toll caused by “the American century.”

David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, TomDispatch regulars, are co-authors and co-editors of seven books and 85 articles on a variety of industrial and occupational hazards, including Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution and, most recently, Lead Wars: The Politics of Science and the Fate of America’s Children.  Rosner is a professor of sociomedical sciences and history at Columbia University and co-director of the Center for the History of Public Health at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. Markowitz is a professor of history at John Jay College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Both have been awarded a certificate of appreciation by the United States Senate through the office of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who has recognized the importance of their work on lead and industrial poisoning.

Cross posted at “TomDispatch.com,” TD.com.

Copyright 2016 David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz

Martin Shkreli is not the problem. The fact that a company like Turing Pharmaceuticals can exist is the problem

Our latest blog entry comes from Nathan Lents, Associate Professor in John Jay’s Department of Sciences. This entry was originally posted on Nathan Lents’ “The Human Evolution Blog.”

Blog entry by: Nathan Lents, 12/17/2015

Martin Shkreli was arrested today. Yay! The whole world will (rightly) cheer. Call it karma, call it “getting his,” call it “reaping what you sow,” call it “justice.”

However, keep in mind that he wasn’t arrested for anything to do with drug pricing or the shady business practices of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Turing Pharmaceuticals, and “companies” like it will continue to exist. And that is the real problem.

When Turing announced its price hike of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750/pill, the world reacted with horror and Shkreli quickly became the most hated man in the world. Daraprim is a life-saving medication for people suffering from toxoplasmosis, caused by a rare parasite affecting mostly those with compromised immune systems. In addition to the price hike, Turing made the drug available only at their specified pharmacy (Walgreen’s) for outpatients.

Turing and Shkreli were caught completely off-guard by the outrage. Shkreli tried to explain that it was a “great thing for society” and that he “shouldn’t be criticized” for this, but the public wasn’t buying it. Eventually, his defense shifted to saying that he had an obligation to make money for his company and that the drug was way underpriced. He has employees to pay and they’ll be unemployed if he doesn’t make money.

But what about that company? No one had ever heard of Turing Pharmaceuticals before this debacle. What is it that they do?

The darapram fiasco IS WHAT THEY DO.

Turing Pharmaceuticals has no research labs, no scientists in white lab coats, and no plans for new drug development. They don’t even have drug manufacturing facilities or anything related to the production, distribution, or selling of pharmaceuticals. They are a “pharmaceutical company” in name only. This is their business model:

1.) Scour the pharmacopeia for niche drugs that fit a certain profile and are “underpriced.” (more on this later)

2.) Buy the manufacturing rights to those drugs. (They still won’t actually make anything. They’ll pay the same plants to make the same pills. Nothing changes.)

3.) Jack up the price of those drugs.

4.) Make huge profits. (Buy yachts, helicopters, and $9,000 bottles of wine.)

5.) When others eventually come in and force the price down, sell the manufacturing rights back, probably at a much higher price.

6.) Move on to the next drug.

This company is not about making or developing drugs. It’s about making money. There’s nothing wrong with making money, but that is ALL that they do.

This is vulture capitalism at its absolute worst, and the way that they pick the drugs to purchase underscores this. The drugs they want are those that fit a certain profile: old, out of patent, sold by just one or two companies, targeted at a very narrow market, and most important of all…  the drug must be life-saving and without available alternatives.

In other words, they want to find drugs that people will die if they don’t get. This allows them to charge as much as they want and the patients will have no choice but to pay.

Turing knows that their price-hike will be temporary because competitors will get in on the game, but if no other companies are currently making a drug, it can take a couple years to get the operation up and running because they still have to get FDA approval. It’s not as long and involved as approval for a new drug, but they do have to show that they can make the drug safely. During those 2-3 years, Turing can extract millions from patients that desperately need the life-saving medication.

Turing has tried to defend itself by saying that they will price the drug at $1 for the poor and uninsured. First of all, does anyone believe that will actually happen? How would that even work? But even if they could do that and they actually followed through, this is still a horrible situation because when insured patients need the drug – WE end up paying for it!

If the patients are insured, those prices are then passed to insurance companies, who pass it on to consumers through our sky-high premiums and co-pays. If the patients are on medicaid or medicare, we all pay for it through our payroll taxes. Either way, we pay for it.

The end result of Turing’s business practice is the massive transfer of wealth from all of us to Martin Shkreli and his sleazy partners. AND WE GET NOTHING IN RETURN.

It’s true that we all transfer massive amounts of wealth to already wealthy companies every day, but we usually get something in return. I have transferred thousands of dollars to Apple over the years, but I got iPhones and MacBooks in return. But daraprim was already developed and on the market for decades. They didn’t CREATE anything.

Turing doesn’t develop anything, doesn’t invent anything, doesn’t create anything, doesn’t produce anything. They are simply in the business of finding hidden corners of the pharmaceutical market where they can swoop in, like the vultures they are, and extract huge sums of money from unsuspecting, and very ill, patients. And it’s all perfectly legal.

Before August of this year, Martin Shkreli had made himself famous in business circles with this general business model, even if the rest of us had never heard of him. He was hailed as a visionary, a genius. We live in a world where this type of vulture capitalism is not just tolerated, but cheered. The only reason the rest of us now know about him is that he went just a bit too far with his pricing. (Not according to him. He thinks it actually should have been higher.)

Turing Pharmaceuticals is not a visionary company. It is a leech. And we are the host. And like all leeches, they provide nothing to their host. They simply take.

Turing and Shkreli touched a nerve this fall because the product they choose to hold ransom is life-saving medication, but how many other companies are there that operate this same vulture model in other industries? What other products and services are price-inflated so that scumbags like Shkreli can extract their piece of the pie, while giving us nothing in return.

They pat themselves on the back and call themselves visionary geniuses, but they are merely clever thieves. And our regulatory system does nothing to stop them.